The Best Year Of My Life: In 35 Tweets

2018 was easily the best year of my life. So many good things happened. So many unexpected things happened.

But 2018 was also a very different kind of year for me.

I spent a lot of time and focus on my career and my startups - and less on things like going out and watching Netflix shows.

I think I sort of got my life on track - financially, career, focus and most importantly, my happiness.

This year, I think I finally found something I truly love - creating products.

It was also a great year because of all of the traction I had. I built a successful indie business, I quit my job, and I became a digital nomad.

I also launched the biggest project of my life (24 hour startup) and inspired thousands of people.

I wanted to write something nice (and complete) to close out the year - a true recap of my first year doing indie startups!

This post is inspired by an old Pieter Levels blog post, where he looks back on his year through his old tweets. I think it’s a really nice way to put together a blog post. That blog post is also very special to me because it’s how I discovered his story and became inspired to follow a similar path.

Fresh off of a startup disaster

Going back to late 2017, I had just experienced a complete startup failure. Two friends and I started a company, got a YC interview, and ultimately failed HARD.

Then I got featured on the front page! And then Ryan Hoover left a comment!

I was on cloud nine! I started dancing around the room with Travis Scott blasting. This is easily one of the greatest moments of my life. I didn’t even reach #1 for the day - I think I was like #5 or #6 - but I was so happy about that.

Finding a community

Around that time, I found WIP - a community that really changed everything for me.

I got to join a chat and work alongside people that were just like me - focused on shipping and building indie businesses.

In WIP, I was in a constant behind the scenes watching indie hackers have success. It felt like every day someone was hitting #1 on Product Hunt or hitting the front page of Hacker News. I got so much support from that community - it was like a startup cheat code!

I also started making “internet friends” from WIP - and was able to build up an amazing network of people I know from around the world.

I feel that YC and many other “startup” authorities talk about how you need co-founders. But often that’s really hard to find!

Maybe I don’t have a co-founder because of my style of working... I don’t know - but it’s really refreshing to see other people have massive success as a solo founder.

Revenue is going up

Meanwhile, my monthly revenue is very slowly going up. Every month, it was a couple hundred bucks. I started getting more and more excited to share my reports each month.

I loved showing people that I was making progress, growing my audience, and keeping myself accountable! That’s one thing that’s great about open startups - you are motivated to show up every month with some nice updates!

I ported over Starter Story to Ruby on Rails (which I know way better) and started shipping tons of features. It was nice to have a balance between content and features. I also started automating a ton of the monotonous stuff that comes with running a blog.

At this time, I started waking up early in the morning before work to work on features that would ultimately save me so much time in the long run. I was waking up at 5:30 AM and putting in 3 hours - it was a very productive time.

For example, I automated all of the social media including generating the images. I absolutely love this kind of stuff.

I don’t know why I love it so much. But it feels so great to automate things and have things be running while you sleep.

Going nomad

And that brings me to today! A few weeks ago, I flew to Thailand to start my digital nomad journey - traveling the world and working on my startups.

2018 was such an amazing year, through many ups and downs, but I’m especially thankful for all of the people that have helped me throughout this journey - even in the smallest ways.

Ready for 2019

I’m realizing that my journey is just beginning.

Although I’ve had some nice success, I want to 10x it. I want 2019 and the next few years to be even bigger. I’m ready to go all in, work hard, build and launch tons of stuff - and most importantly find my way!

I’m so excited. Thank you for reading.

Update: A couple people mentioned they were trying to reach me over text, my American number doesn’t work anymore! Hit me up on Instagram or you can iMessage me at [email protected] :)